Dark Eyes & Dimples
by mew-tsubaki
Summary: Oneshot. Torres hides out in Abby's lab For Reasons . .::pre-Clellick::.


**Dark Eyes & Dimples**

An NCIS oneshot

by mew-tsubaki

Note: The _NCIS_ characters belong to Donald P. Bellasario, not to me. Just jumping in head first with some Clellick content. :3c Read, review, and enjoy!

\- ^-^3

"Nick…whatcha doing down there?"

"Hiding, Abby."

Abby moved her desk chair out of the way and bent over so she could get a better look at Torres. She narrowed her eyes at him, keeping a suspicious smile on her black-colored lips. "I can see that. But one—why?—and two—why in my lab?"

He pulled his eyes from his phone's screen to look up at her. "It's nice and quiet down here. I get why you can get so much work done."

"Work, huh? And how is that _Candy Crush_ case going? Got any leads?"

Torres grumbled and put the game away. He took the hand she offered and climbed out from under her desk—but he glanced at the door and did a poor job of doing so subtly.

Abby looked at the open metal door, too. "Hiding from someone?"

He scoffed and rolled his eyes. "No."

She raised her eyebrows.

"…maybe."

"What did you do, Torres?"

"I'm offended. Why do you have to make the jump that _I_ did something?"

Abby cocked her head to one side. "You could be hiding from Gibbs for not finishing a report. Hiding from McGee because you broke something of his. Hiding from Bishop because you ate something of hers. Maybe even hiding from Reeves because you bicker half the time you two interact."

Torres snorted. "What, that doesn't also apply to me and Bishop?"

She nodded. "Point taken. But you still haven't answered my question," Abby continued, and she led him by the hand out to her lab proper and sat him down on her work stool. She paused only to grab a pack of Twizzlers out of a nearby cabinet, and she passed him one. "So spill."

Not that he needed the sugar, but Torres gnawed on the candy rope anyway to keep his mouth preoccupied. He did know _who_ he was escaping…he just hadn't exactly figured out why.

Gibbs and McGee weren't the issue. In fact, they weren't even in the office right now, having gone to help prep a witness in a cold case for her testimony tomorrow.

That left Bishop, Reeves, and Torres to catch up on paperwork and other details in the office. Normally not an issue, but both Bishop and Reeves had woken up on the right side of the bed this morning, and Torres was never one to be very interested in paperwork, so…

Torres took another quick look at the open door. He got up and closed it for his own piece of mind.

"Bishop. And Reeves," he said when he sat back down.

"Both of them? Yikes."

He narrowed his eyes at her. "If you're still thinking I did something, then stop, because that's not the case. They're just—frustrating. Frustrating me."

Her smile was friendly but skeptical. "That's the purpose of friends and family. They annoy the hell out of you."

Torres grimaced, because "annoy" honestly wasn't the right word. Or was it?

Upstairs, he knew, Bishop sat in her chair with the kind of perfect posture she never had when hunched over her laptop on the floor, working on touching up some reports to be submitted while managing to catch every last bit of the news despite the low volume of the TV in the background and chatting away with Reeves and Torres. Even if she didn't exactly laugh at every one of Reeves' jokes or clever turns of phrase, she kept cracking a smile. It was distracting.

And Reeves was no better, leaving his desk on the other side of the partition and skimming his own reports for typos as he joined the other two agents in the bullpen, managing to read nearly as fast as Bishop or even McGee while offering up some quips every few moments and making eye contact with Torres to follow up and ensure Torres wasn't feeling left out. He even, once he finally decided to sit, came and sat on the edge of Torres' desk and offered to help with Torres' reports since Reeves had, in his own opinion, the best grammar skills of them all since his spoke the Queen's English. The offer was said with a smile that was maybe teasing and maybe wasn't. That was also distracting.

"Distracting, huh?"

Torres snapped out of his thoughts. "What?"

Abby sighed and passed him another Twizzler. "You've been thinking aloud this whole time, Torres. It's probably a good thing that you closed the door."

He'd been…? Oh, hell. He wanted to be deep undercover very far away right about now.

"Don't worry about it, though. You haven't said anything they'd want to smack you for." She furrowed her brow. "But I don't follow what made you escape them down here. What part's distracting? Are they keeping you from getting work done?"

"Yes! Exactly. That's exactly it."

"But how? Is it the chatting? Because they're not very loud people—at least not Bishop. And Reeves offering to help is just Reeves being his sweet old self."

"No, it's their smiles." Although, even as he said it, Torres knew how absurd he sounded.

Abby seemed to agree, as she put the candy away and nudged him to his feet. "So you don't like their smiles? C'mon, Nick—even _you_ have to know that's the worst made-up excuse to play hooky." She opened the lab door and waved him on out. "Just head back upstairs before Gibbs returns and comes looking for you."

He grumbled but thanked her for the candy anyway. Still, he rounded the corner at the end of the hallway and stared at the elevator doors without pushing the call button.

She had it wrong. Of course he didn't _hate_ their smiles. Who the hell hated someone smiling at them, especially if it were Bishop or Reeves? They both had that crinkled-eye, teeth-always-showing kind of smile that was hard to be anything but genuine. And if they were being playful, the dimples on their chins became more prominent—and their eyes would have that infuriating twinkle in them and—

Torres banged his head against the wall beside the elevator. Dammit.

Dark brown eyes that always sought him out and dimples that appeared when they smiled with maybe-not-maybe inviting intentions…

_ Nicholas Torres had a _type_._

And both Clayton Reeves and Eleanor Bishop fit it to a T.

\- ^-^ 3

**=w= Nick Torres figuring out he Has Feelings**™** is something I will always love. XD I've had some OT3 feelings for Clellick for a while now and finally set down some hcs in a recent tumblr post, and that helped me develop some fic ideas, too (not to mention some doodle ideas). But it was actually in my adventure in grabbing reference photos for these three that I finally noticed the dark eyes and dimples detail I used on poor Torres here, and I find it brilliant that it just so happens to be a canon thing about Reeves' and Bishop's actors. I also need to thank the wonderful thinking music that is the guitar-playing of Rodrigo y Gabriela for helping me focus long enough to get the last string of thoughts down on the page, *lol*; also my papa mew for being quiet when he came home and I was still struggling to find the right words. :D But here's to more Clellick from me, and soon!**

**Thanks for reading, and please review! Check out my other **_**NCIS**_** fics if you liked this.**

**-mew-tsubaki :}**


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